marler2013

@Book{ marler2013,
    author = {Scott P. Marler},
    title = {The Merchants' Capital: New Orleans and the Political Economy of the Nineteenth-Century South},
    address = {New York},
    publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
    year = 2013,
}

p. 2: “Unlike industrialists, who derived their profits from the organization of production itself, merchant capitalists usually operated at a cautious remove from production processes, instead concerning themselves mainly with their ability to exploit differences in commodity values in geographically separated markets.”

p. 10:

Much recent scholarship has relied heavily on the notion of a ‘market revolution’ to portray a convergence of classes and interests in the antebellum United States, but such perspectives are hard-pressed to explain why the nation became so bitterly divided that it ultimately engaged in four years of bloody civil war. This study, by contrast, remains convinced by the testimony of most northern, southern, and foreign contemporaries about the growth of ‘irreconcilable conflicts’ between the North and South during the 1850s, focusing on how southern merchant capital helped buttress the system of plantation slavery and thereby helped inhibit processes of class formation, urbanization, and fixed-capital investments that typified modernization elsewhere.

p. 27: regional cotton boom (“40,000 bales of cotton in 1816 to nearly a million by 1840”) led to increased commerce in the city, which in turn provided credit “to underwrite regional land and slave purchases. Hundreds of new firms and investors flocked to the city during these initial boom years, which lasted until the national financial panic of 1837.”

p. 28: But “the pace of southwestern expansion [of cotton culture] slowed considerably after the Panic of 1837, with severe effects in New Orleans. One historian has estimated that the panic forced a majority of the city’s factorage houses into bankruptcy,” even as cotton production continued a pace. The panic “inaugurated a period of ‘retrenchment’ among New Orleans merchants during the 1840s.”

p. 37: Steve Deyle’s “estimate that the internal slave trade contributed $12 to $17 million annually to the southern economy during the 1840s and 1850s” was much lower than that contributed by cotton production itself. But these estimates “do not take full account of the ‘multiplier effects’ that plantation slavry had on Crescent City commerce. The thriving retail sector of New Orleans (whose 1,881 stores in 1840 were the main reason that Louisiana had the highest per capita investment in retailing in the United States) drew most of its strength from the provision of supplies such as dry goods, hardware, and foodstuffs to regional slave plantation, as did the city’s large wholesale trade.”¹

City factors and merchants frequently speculated in slaves or purchased for hiring out (p. 37). Slaves as a source of capital accumulation as well as labor.

p. 38: By 1850s, New Orleans utter dependence on slavery and cotton clear, “but during the early 1840s, the situation had looked different. Then, the slave-based regional economy still appeared as only one strand of a wider web of commercial relationships that resulted from the city’s location at the base of the Mississippi River system.”

p. 42: Notes that the completion of canals allowing west-to-east trade on the Great Lakes networks hurt grain receipts in New Orleans significantly, and foodstuffs retailers began to assume a lower place in the city’s mercantie hierarchy. (Is it possible Cirode Family was serving as a western produce grocer?) This despite the assumption of so many boosters, well into the 1850s, that New Orleans’ geographical position made it inevitable it would get upriver trade (44-47). Some early Cassandras realized though that “concentrated capital in an industrial age had no need to respect ‘natural advantages’: the aggressive new breed of businessmen who controlled ‘Eastern capital’ were using it to literally reinscribe national maps with the canals and railroads that now patterned the western landscape.”